b l o g o s

06.06.06

Today's date is one of those dates that, just like Jenny and Jeff's hotel room number at RSA, is a little chilling, numerologically speaking. Were I thirteen and back in eastern Tennessee, where rumors of Satanism were likely more rampant than Satanism itself--or were they?--my eyes would probably grow wide; I might go over the number of letters in each of Ronald Reagan's full name, working them like a mouthful of loose teeth; I would stay out of the woods, and I would not--definitely not--damage the needle on my record player by spinning vinyl backwards.

Nah, I'm all grown up and live in the hearty midwest, and so I'll probably just settle in with Josh Gunn's Modern Occult Rhetoric, which arrived just in time for the occasion. I think I'll start with the chapter called "Prime Time Satanism," which--irony of numerological ironies--happens to be chapter 7.

My cell phone number, by the way, has three sixes in a row, so maybe no one should call me. Just for today. And for the record, my middle name only has four letters. Nah.

drafted!

The first chapter of my book, though among the last to reach draft-stage. Four days ahead of schedule. This one culls an incipient rhetoric from Burke's short fiction and music criticism, and only in the past few days did I realize that's what it was doing.

The epigraph of the chapter is a stanza from "Know Thyself," a poem KB wrote sometime in the mid 1950s or early 60s:

______________________________

One-third insomnia

One-third art

On-third The Man

With the Cardiac Heart

______________________________

And for some reason I have the Cars song, "Summer,"  "Magic" (I don't really know the titles, people, but I damn well know all the lyrics) stuck in the old brain.

How far can you take it, indeed?

robot v. plant

What happens at fun summer cocktail parties hosted by neighbors who work on cyberinfrastructure, digital humanities, and liberation technology?

Robo sapien battles the common house plant, that's what.

over and out.

If the weather is as gorgeous where you are as it is where we are, what are you doing reading blogs? And what am I doing blogging?

noise

Scene: the MRI/CT waiting room, in the basement of Carle Clinic. One television mounted at the end of the corridor-like room, 12-16 people, give and take, depending on who's been called. An older man is slumped in a giant la-Z-boy, chin-to-chest and snoring. A man with slicked back hair wheels in his wife who jumps up with her cane and disappears down the hall. Slick goes after her, muttering about how "she'll get herself lost," and he himself, it turns out, gets lost.

MRI techs are running behind schedule, and a pattern starts to emerge:  each new sunny-faced MRI waiter is approached by a technician and given the news about the longer wait. And each time, the woman with a powdery face and ink black hair leans over and tells the "real story": "They told me a half hour, and I've been here more than an hour." The sunniness of the new person darkens a bit.

I'm editing rewriting in the margins the first chapter of my book-in-progress while unsuccessfully trying to block the plot on The Guiding Light in which Reva is apparently hiding her cancer from Josh/is in total denial herself, I'm not sure which. My first thought is: since when did soap stars get tenure? These characters have been on that show since I was--no joke--in the 5th grade. And secondly, maybe the waiting room adjacent to oncology might want to think twice before showing this particular show. Next is Dr. Phil, who is featuring "crude relatives," including a sister who has been known to respond to rising gas prices by informing a gas station attendant that she expects the pumps to be covered with KY Jelly.  (OMG.)

The flashing and beeping severe thunderstorm warnings bring reprieve from Dr. Phil but still flicker at the edge of my attention because no one in the place knows where Livingston County is. I scramble around for a map I'd noticed in some crazy magazine, a thinly veiled thickly presented gob of advertisements called "the best of C-U," but Livingston County doesn't even touch us. By the time I make the discovery, the waiters--and the thunderstorms--have moved  on. And then comes Oprah. Thank god for Oprah. Everyone watches Oprah in dreamy, smiley silence, and I edit to the sound of Oprah moving in and out of commercials.

ties that bind

Included with my letter from the Provost confirming the reports that I'm being offered tenure and promotion are two documents, both originating from the American Association of University Professors, and both showing signs of having been xeroxed over and over, copies of copies, with their crooked margins and dark, thick, sometimes blurred text with various accidental toner imprints likely from the 80s and 90s. The first document is the AAUP's "1940 Statement on Academic Freedom and Tenure With 1970 Interpretive Comments"; the second is its "Statement on Professional Ethics." Based on the titles, I take these to be reminders about the lifelong contract that is tenure--explicit statements about the institution's promise to support academic freedom and our promise in turn to respect the limits of that freedom. Both documents are really interesting just in terms of the meaning (and the history) of tenure, and in places they can also be read as rhetorical manuals for tenured professors, gathered into handy outlines.

Take, for example, (c) under the Interpretive Comments on Academic Freedom, which states:

______________________________________________________________________

College and university teachers are citizens, members of a learned profession, and officers of an educational institution. When they speak or write as citizens, they should   be free from institutional censorship or discipline, but their special position in the community imposes special obligations. As scholars and educational officers, they should remember that the public may judge their profession and their institution by their utterances. Hence they should at all times be accurate, should exercise appropriate restraint, should show respect for the opinions of others, and should make every effort to indicate that they are not speaking for the institution.
______________________________________________________________________

This passage is crying out for a little parsing. On one hand, it's a formal discussion of the lived reality of professors: the inextricability of their professions from their daily lives. At base, too, this is a commentary on institutional and professional identity as iteratively performed by those with titles and affiliations. Just as Judith Butler teaches us that gender is performed as a "stylized repetition of acts," the AAUP's Statement on Academic Freedom reminds us that institutional and professional identities operate along similar citational lines. Such a reading holds up until the last line, where things get even more complicated. By dint of the fact that university teachers always subtly invoke their institution and profession, this line asks that they attend meticulously to issues of ethos even as they explicitly separate their words from their institution.

So I have an idea. Since everybody knows that along with Tenure comes more committee work, I'd like to be placed on the Tenure T shirt committee--okay, okay, I'll chair it--and my legacy would be this: from now on, in addition to the documents from the AAUP, newly tenured professors would also receive something more practical, something that enacts, nay, performs the Spirit of Tenure. My proposed design would look something like this:

And, for good measure, since the contract binds both ways:

 

queering mt. everest

I am a little obsessed with this slip/rupture, brought to us by You Tube and Elizabeth, the soon-to-be-defended cultural/rhetorical critic of Everest and recent convert to bloggerdom. After the break indeed.